Garmin / Strava and long rides (>24 hours)

[Blackhound]

I am doing a couple of audax rides over next couple of months of 400km and 600km. The 400km starts at 9pm and I hope to finish in 24 hours - I have an allowance of 28 hours - but I may go over the 24 hours and it will be 2 days anyway with a 9pm start.

The 600 will be over a weekend as it starts at 6am on a Saturday and I am hopeful of a 36-38 hour ride.

I would like to keep my Strava upload to show the correct distance for each ride rather than two shorter ones. Onany long rides I have done previously I have created separate files for each day stopping when I stop for the night, I am not sure what will happen on these EPIC rides.

Will riding past either midnight or over 24 hours cause my Garmin Dakota 20 to get as confused as its owner? Or is there anything I need to do. Or do I just turn it on at the start and off at the end and the wonders of modern technology will sort it all out for me?

[whitestone]

I don't have your particular model but I've seen elsewhere that there's some file size limit on Garmins, it may be only some models though.

You can use fitfiletools.com to stitch together Garmin FIT files so save your ride every 12hrs or so then stitch them together when you get home and import in to Strava. I've not uploaded such a big file to Strava so you might need to check with someone who has.

Edit: Looking at Strava it seems that there's a 25Mb limit on the size of the files you upload.

[ctznsmith]

I've loaded multiple day rides from my Garmin Oregon to strava and it's been fine. So I have an elapsed time on one upload last year of 173 and a bit hours and it worked fine.

I discovered from creating manual uploads for my last tour (to track kit mileage) that Strava restricts you to 98 hours I think and 999 miles.

I would be more worried about available memory on the Garmin, I had to manually upload that tour because base maps on the Garmin took up more room so I could only store two days of riding at a time. When I rode another day it would automatically lose the previous one. That could also be due to the file size limit mentioned though I was assuming device memory.

[Chew]

Kevin

Your garmin (like mine) will archive your routes once they get to a certain file size. It'll depend on your recording settings as to how far that is, but you wont get the whole route in one file.

What I did when i did my 1400k trip to Scotland last year, I saved down as a different file every day and then stitched then together when I got home into one whole file, before putting it on strava.

The gpx file is just a text file, so its very easy to stitch them together if you know what to look for in the code

Basically open the .gpx file within notepad (you'll have this on your pc)
Theres the header on the front with the name of the file, date etc.....
Then you'll get the start of the track '<trkseg>'
A load of code stating the Lon, Lat, Elevation, Time
then at the end '</trkseg></trk></gpx>'

Basically copy and paste all of the Lon, Lat, Elevation, Time code into one file making sure you keep the headers and footers. Once you've finished you can upload to bikehike to check the code before you upload to strava

You could probably leave it running and use the archive files to do this (i've not tried it yet) or there may be some fancy interweb tool to help you do it

[Dave Barter]

http://joewein.net/bike/gpxmerge/

I use this thanks to a recommendation from Alan G

[Zippy]

Yeah, what Dave said. If you have the file as a .gpx (which is xml compliant), relative piece of cake to stitch these files together anyways

[numplumz]

Another recommendation to save every 12 hrs. Easy to reset the track log but leave the ride stats active for full distance.
Base camp also works to stitch files together.

[numplumz]

Which 600 have you chosen Kevin?

[Blackhound]

Thanks all, will look into those options.

Jack - I am doing the 9 counties from Alfreton. Not many options as away in May and hoping it will be fairly flat.